The ladder of credibility

When I taught Critical Thinking in high school, one of the principles I harped on was "check your sources."

The difficulty is, I don't just mean "see where the claim is mentioned."  You also need to do the work of seeing if the source that mentions it is itself reputable.  But there's an additional complication that makes our job as skeptics way harder, and that's the handoff that occurs, one source to another, sometimes leaving a story light years from where it started.

Let's look at an example of this phenomenon, which is the strange claim that appeared in a 2023 paper in The Journal of World Science.  The paper was entitled "Concept of Time Travel and the Different Theories Making it Possible and the Implications of Time Travel," and was by three authors, one from Pakistan and two from a university in Indonesia.

The paper opens with a bang:

In March 2003, the FBI arrested 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin.  Newspapers reported that this man was so fortunate in the history of the Stock Market.  He invested $800, and within two weeks, it turned into $350 million.  The FBI suspected that he was running a scam.  That he was an inside trader.  When Andrew was questioned, he answered that he was a time traveler.  He claimed that he was a traveler from 250 years in the future and that he knew how the stocks would perform, so he invested in them and got the extraordinary result.  The FBI was convinced that he was lying, and when they investigated some more, they found that Before December 2002, there was no record of Carlssin.  Even more surprising was that on 3rd April, Carlssin had to appear in court for his bail hearing, but he had disappeared, never to be found again.  Was he a time traveler?

Well, first off, the odd diction, sentence fragments, and random capitalization should be a hint that something is amiss; reputable journals are usually pretty careful about this kind of thing.  It could be that (given the fact that none of the authors come from a predominantly English-speaking country) that was the fault of the translator(s), however, so we'll let that slide for now.

But if you read a little further, you find that the weirdness only intensifies:

The first way is to get a glimpse of the past by Teleporting from one place of the universe to another distant place in the universe with instant travel and then; through any strong Telescope and then look back on the Earth through it then, we can able to see how many lights year before our earth looks like, how much in the past we can see is dependent on our distance from Earth the far we are the far we can see in the Past (Rabounski & Borissova, 2022).  Because it takes a significant time for light to travel from one place to another, even with how fast light travels, if we talk about distance in light-years, it takes years for light to travel to some places.  So, if we could get somewhere before the light reaches there and then look back at the approaching light, the light would be from the past.  That is how we can see the past.

Simple!  Get to a distant planet faster than light, and look back at Earth through a telescope!  How come I didn't think of that?

But hey, it's in a scientific journal, right?  With source citations and everything! 

Someone shoulda told the Doctor.  He could have ditched the TARDIS altogether.

There's a wee problem, here, though.  The Andrew Carlssin story that started the paper, and which is repeatedly referred to throughout, ended up in The Journal of World Science after repeated handoffs wherein the claim incrementally worked its way up the ladder of credibility (and in fact, along the way showed up in a number of reasonably reliable news services, albeit usually in their "Odd Stories" or "Unsolved Mysteries" features).  But if you trace the thread from its appearance in a science journal in 2023 all the way back to its origins in 2003, you find out that the whole thing started...

... in The Weekly World News.

Yes, The Weekly World News, that wonderful tabloid famous for features about Taylor Swift secretly giving birth to Bigfoot's baby, and that a creature called Bat Boy is going to win the U. S. presidential election in 2032.  (My feeling at the moment is President Boy wouldn't be any worse than our current excuse for a leader.)

My conclusion from this is that there should be some kind of skeptic's version of "All Roads Lead to Rome" that goes, "All Bullshit Ultimately Leads Back to The Weekly World News."

Despite its antecedents, since then, the Carlssin story has appeared all over the place, usually with no mention of its absurd roots.  An example is a story in Medium that treats it as if it were one hundred percent real, and which along the way suggests that Greta Thunberg is also a time traveler.  "Many [people] wonder," the author says, "if she possesses the power to bend time itself."

What I wonder is who those "many people" are.  My thought is it's a little like how Trump says "I've heard from dozens of reputable sources..." immediately before he says something that amounts to "... this idiotic lie that I just now pulled out of my ass, and that you'd have to have the IQ of a bar of soap to believe."

To illustrate how this handoff can occur, I deliberately chose a ridiculous example that (I dearly hope) none of you would have believed regardless where you read it.  But the same thing happens with more serious claims.  You hear some statistic -- such as the claim that in the last eight months, U.S. policies have spurred seventeen trillion dollars of foreign investment into our country's industry -- and find it's quoted all over the place, including in reputable news services.  In this case, if you're reasonably savvy you might pick up on the red flag that the claim is more than a little bit implausible; seventeen trillion dollars is around one-fifth of the total gross national product of every nation on Earth combined.

But then you start tracking it backward, and you find out that it traces its origins to yet another instance of Donald Trump plucking a random number out of thin air to make himself look good, and the few news sources who are willing to challenge him on anything have identified it as a flat-out unadulterated lie.  The rest just passed it off as fact -- and then the handoff began, until the figure became so well-publicized that if you google "seventeen trillion dollars" the entire first page of hits is about the amazing windfall American businesses are receiving because of Trump's policies.

So it's not sufficient any more to say "I read it in The Wall Street Journal."  To be honest, it probably never was.  If you want to be certain of something, you have to figure out where the claim originated -- which can be difficult work.  But the alternative is trusting the knowledge and good intentions of the media source you use.

These days, that is seriously thin ice.

If you want to be informed, which I hope all of you do, watch your sources.  Find out where they got the information, and make sure the sort of twenty-year-long Game of Telephone that landed a time travel story from The Weekly World News in The Journal of World Science hasn't tempted you to believe something ludicrous.

Even if "many people" are saying it.

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Djinn and paradox

In the very peculiar Doctor Who episode "Joy to the World," the character of Joy Almondo is being controlled by a device inside a briefcase that -- if activated -- will release as much energy as a supernova, destroying the Earth (and the rest of the Solar System).  But just at the nick of time, a future version of the Doctor (from exactly one year later) arrives and gives the current Doctor the override code, saving the day.

The question comes up, though, of how the future Doctor knew what the code was.  The current Doctor, after all, hadn't known it until he was told.  He reasons that during that year, he must have learned the code from somewhere or someone -- but the year passes without anyone contacting him about the briefcase and its contents.  Right before the year ends (at which point he has to jump back to complete the loop) he realizes that his surmise wasn't true.  Because, of course, he already knew the code.  He'd learned it from his other self.  So armed with that knowledge, he jumps back and saves the day.

Well, he saves the moment, at least.  As it turns out, their troubles are just beginning, but that's a discussion for another time.

A similar trope occurred in the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time, but with an actual physical object rather than just a piece of information.  Playwright Richard Collier (played by Christopher Reeve) is at a party celebrating the debut of his most recent play, and is approached by an elderly woman who hands him an ornate pocket watch and says, in a desperate voice, "Come back to me."  Collier soon goes back in time by six decades, finds her as a young woman, and they fall desperately in love -- and he gives her the pocket watch.  Ultimately, he's pulled back into the present, and his girlfriend grows old without him, but right before she dies she finds him and gives him back the watch, closing the loop.

All of this makes for a fun twist; such temporal paradoxes are common fare in fiction, after all.  And the whole thing seems to make sense until you ask the question of, respectively (1) where did the override code originally come from? and (2) who made the pocket watch?

Because when you think about it -- and don't think too hard, because these kinds of things are a little boggling -- neither one has any origin.  They're self-creating and self-destroying, looped like the famous Ouroboros of ancient myth, the snake swallowing its own tail. 

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The pocket watch is especially mystifying, because after all, it's an actual object.  If Collier brought it back with him into the past, then it didn't exist prior to the moment he arrived in 1920, nor after the moment he left in 1980 -- which seems to violate the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy.

Physicists Andrei Lossev and Igor Novikov called such originless entities "djinn particles," because (like the djinn, or "genies," of Arabian mythology) they seem to appear out of nowhere.  Lossev and Novikov realized that although "closed timelike curves" are, theoretically at least, allowed by the Theory of General Relativity, they all too easily engender paradoxes.  So they proposed something they call the self-consistency principle -- that time travel into the past is possible if and only if it does not generate a paradox.

So let's say you wanted to do something to change history.  Say, for example, that you wanted to go back in time and give Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales some medication to save his life from the fever that otherwise killed him at age fifteen.  This would have made him king of England seven years later instead of his younger brother, who would have become the infamous King Henry VIII, thus dramatically changing the course of history.  In the process, of course, it also generates a paradox; because if Henry VIII never became king, you would have no motivation to go back into the past and prevent him from becoming king, right?  Your own memories would be consistent with the timeline of history that led to your present moment.  Thus, you wouldn't go back in time and save Arthur's life.  But this would mean Arthur would die at fifteen, Henry VIII becomes king instead, and... well, you see the difficulty.

Lossev and Novikov's self-consistency principle fixes this problem.  It tells us that your attempt to save Prince Arthur must have failed -- because we know that didn't happen.  If you did go back in time, you were simply incorporated into whatever actually did happen.

Timeline of history saved.  Nothing changed.  Ergo, no paradox.

You'd think that physicists would kind of go "whew, dodged that bullet," but interestingly, most of them look at the self-consistency principle as a bandaid, an unwarranted and artificial constraint that doesn't arise from the models themselves.  Joseph Polchinski came up with another paradoxical situation -- a billiard ball fired into a wormhole at exactly the right angle that when it comes out of the other end, it runs into (and deflects) itself, preventing it from entering the wormhole in the first place -- and analysis by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne found there's nothing inherent in the models that prevents this sort of thing.

Some have argued that the ease with which time travel into the past engenders paradox is an indication that it's simply an impossibility; eventually, they say, we'll find that there's something in the models that rules out reversing the clock entirely.  In fact, in 2009, Stephen Hawking famously hosted a time-travelers' party at Cambridge University, complete with fancy food, champagne, and balloons -- but only sent out invitations the following day.  He waited several hours, and no one showed up.

That, he said, was that.  Because what time traveler could resist a party?

But there's still a lingering issue, because it seems like if it really is impossible, there should be some way to prove it rigorously, and thus far, that hasn't happened.  Last week we looked at the recent paper by Gavassino et al. that implied a partial loophole from the Second Law of Thermodynamics -- if you could travel into the past, entropy would run backwards during part of the loop and erase your memory of what had happened -- but it still leaves the question of djinn particles and self-deflecting billiard balls unsolved.

Seems like we're stuck with closed timelike curves, paradoxes notwithstanding.

Me, I think my mind is blown sufficiently for one day.  Time to go play with my puppy, who only worries about paradoxes like "when is breakfast?" and the baffling question of why he is not currently getting a belly rub.  All in all, probably a less stressful approach to life.

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Reversing the arrow

In my short story "Retrograde," the main character, Eli, meets a woman who makes the bizarre claim that she experiences time running backwards.

She's not like Benjamin Button, who ages in reverse; she experiences everything in reverse.  But from our perspective, nothing seems amiss.  From hers, though... she remembers future events and not past ones:

Hannah gave him a long, steady look.  "All I can say is that we see the same things.  For me, the film runs backwards, that’s all.  Other than that, there’s no difference.  There’s nothing I can do to change the way things unfold, same as with you."

"That’s why you were crying when I came in.  Because of something that for you, had already happened?  What was it?"

She shook her head.  "I shouldn’t answer that, Eli."

"It’s me, isn’t it?  For me, I was just meeting you for the first time.  For you, it was the last time you’d ever see me."  I winced, and rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand.  "Jesus, I’m starting to believe you.  But that’s it, right?"

Hannah didn’t answer for a moment.  "The thing is—you know, you start looking at things as inevitable.  Like you’re in some sort of film.  The actors seem to have freedom.  They seem to have will, but in reality the whole thing is scrolling by and what’s going to happen is only what’s already written in the script.  You could, if you wanted to, start at the end and run the film backwards.  Same stuff, different direction.  No real difference except for the arrow of time."

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity shows that space and time are inextricably linked -- spacetime -- but doesn't answer the perplexing question of why we can move in any direction through space, but only one direction through time.  You can alter the rate of time's passage, at least relative to some other reference frame, by changing your velocity; but unlike what the characters in "Retrograde" experience, the arrow always points the same way.  

This becomes odder still when you consider that in just about all physical processes, there is no inherent arrow of time.  Look at a video clip of a pool ball bouncing off the side bumper, then run it backwards -- it'd be damn hard to tell which was the actual, forward-running clip.

Hard -- but not impossible.  The one physical law that has an inherent arrow of time is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  If the clip was long enough, or your measurement devices sensitive enough, you could tell which was the forward clip because in that one, the pool ball would be slowing down from dissipation of its kinetic energy in the form of friction with the table surface.  Likewise, water doesn't unspill, glasses unbreak, snowbanks un-avalanche, reassembling in pristine smoothness on the mountainside.  But why this impels a universal forward-moving arrow of time -- and more personally, why it makes us remember the past and not the future -- is still an unanswered question.

"The arrow of time is only an illusion," Einstein quipped, "but it is a remarkably persistent one."

Two recent papers have shed some light on this strange conundrum.  In the first, a team led by Andrea Rocco of Surrey University looked how the equations of the Second Law work on the quantum level, and found something intriguing; introducing the Second Law into the quantum model generated two arrows of time, one pointing into the past and one pointing into the future.  But no matter which time path is taken, entropy still increases as you go down it.

"You’d still see the milk spilling on the table, but your clock would go the other way around," Rocco said.  "In this way, entropy still increases, but it increases toward the past instead of the future.  The milk doesn’t flow back into the glass, which the Second Law of Thermodynamics forbids, but it flows out of the glass in the direction of the past.  Regardless of whether time’s arrow shoots toward the future or past from a given moment, entropy will still dissipate in that given direction."

In the second, from Lorenzo Gavassino of Vanderbilt University et al., the researchers were investigating the mathematics of "closed time-like loops" -- i.e., time travel into the past, followed by a return to your starting point.  And what they found was that once again, the Second Law gets in the way of anything wibbly-wobbly.

Gavassino's model shows that on a closed time-like loop, entropy must peak somewhere along the loop -- so along some part of the loop, entropy has to decrease to return it to where it was when the voyage began.  The equations then imply that one of two things must be true.  Either:

1. Time travel into the past is fundamentally impossible, because it would require entropy to backpedal; or
2. If overall entropy can decrease somewhere along the path, it would undo everything that had happened along the entropy-increasing part of the loop, including your own memories.  So you could time travel, but you wouldn't remember anything about it (including that it had ever happened).

"Any memory that is collected along the closed time-like curve," Gavassino said, "will be erased before the end of the loop."

So that's no fun at all.  Lieutenant Commander Geordi LaForge would like to have a word with you, Dr. Gavassino.

Anyhow, that's today's excursion into one of the weirdest parts of physics.  Looks like the Second Law of Thermodynamics is still strictly enforced in all jurisdictions.  Time might be able to run backwards, but you'd never know because (1) entropy will still increase in that direction, and (2) any loop you might take will result in your remembering nothing about the trip.  So I guess we're still stuck with clocks running forwards -- and having to wait to find out what's going to happen in the future at a rate of one minute per minute.

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Paradoxes and pointlessness

In his 1967 short story "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," writer R. A. Lafferty took one of the first looks at something that since has become a standard trope in science fiction; going back into the past and doing something that changes history.

In his hilarious take on things, some time-machine-wielding scientists pick an event in history that seems to have been a critical juncture (they chose the near-miss assassination attempt on Charlemagne in 778 C.E. that immediately preceded the Battle of Roncevaux), then send an "avatar" back in time to change what happened.  The avatar kills the guy who saved Charlemagne's life, Charlemagne himself is killed, and his consolidation of power into what would become the Holy Roman Empire never happens.

Big deal, right?  Major repercussions down throughout European history?  Well, what happens is that when the change occurs, it also changes the memories of the scientists -- how they were educated, what they knew of history.  The avatar comes back, and everything is different, but the scientists are completely unaware of what's happened -- because their history now includes the change the avatar made.

So they decide that Charlemagne's assassination must have had no effect on anything, and they pick a different historical event to change.  The avatar goes back to try again -- with the same results.

Each time the avatar returns, things have become more and more different from where they started -- and still, none of the characters inside the story can tell.  They can never, in C. S. Lewis's words, "know what might have happened;" no matter what they do, those alternate timelines remain forever outside their ability to see.

In the end, the scientists give up.  Nothing, they conclude, has any effect on the course of events, so trying to change history is a complete waste of time.

One has to wonder if Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has read Lafferty's story, because Loeb just authored an article in The Debrief entitled, "The Wormhole Dilemma: Could Advanced Civilizations Use Time Travel to Rewrite History?"  Which, incidentally, is a fine example of Betteridge's Law -- "any headline phrased as a question can be answered with the word 'no.'"

Before we get into what the article says, I have to say that I'm getting a little fed up with Loeb himself.  He's something of a frequent flier on Skeptophilia and other science-based skepticism websites (such as the one run by the excellent Jason Colavito), most recently for his strident claim that meteoric debris found in the Pacific Ocean was from the wreckage of an alien spacecraft.  (tl;dr: It wasn't.)  

I know we skeptical types can be a little hard to budge sometimes, and a criticism levied against us with at least some measure of fairness is that we're so steeped in doubting that we wouldn't believe evidence if we had it.  But even so, Loeb swings so far in the opposite direction that it's become difficult to take anything he says seriously.  In the article in The Debrief, he talks about how wormholes have been shown to be mathematically consistent with what we know about physics (correct), and that Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking demonstrated that they could theoretically be kept open long enough to allow passage of something from one point in spacetime to another (also correct).  

This would require, however, the use of something with negative mass-energy to stabilize the wormhole so it doesn't snap shut immediately.  Which is a bit of a sticking point, because there's never been any proof that such a something actually exists.

Oh, but that's no problem, Loeb says; dark energy has negative (repulsive) energy, so an advanced civilization could "excavate dark energy from the cosmic reservoir and mold it into a wormhole."  He admits that we don't know if this is possible because we still have no idea what dark energy actually is, but then goes into a long bit about how we (or well-intentioned aliens) could use such a wormhole to "fix history," starting with getting rid of Adolf Hitler and preventing the Holocaust.

A laudable goal, no doubt, but let's just hang on a moment.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of artist Martin Johnson]

The idea of the altering of history potentially creating intractable paradoxes is a staple of science fiction, ever since Lafferty (and Ray Bradbury in his brilliant and devastating short story "The Sound of Thunder") brought it into the public awareness.  Besides my own novel Lock & Key, in which such a paradox wipes out all of humanity except for one dubiously lucky man who somehow escapes being erased and ends up having to fix the problem, this sort of thing seemed to happen every other week on Star Trek: The Next Generation, where one comes away with the sense that the space-time continuum is as flimsy as a wet Kleenex.  It may be that there is some sort of built-in protection in the universe for preventing paradoxes -- such as the famous example of going back in time and killing your own grandfather -- but even that point is pure speculation, because the physicists haven't shown that time travel into the past is possible, much less practical.

So Loeb's article is, honestly, a little pointless.  He looks at an idea that countless fiction writers -- including myself -- have been exploring ad nauseam since at least 1967, and adds nothing to the conversation from a scientific perspective other than saying, "Hey, maybe superpowerful aliens could do it!"  As such, what he's done is really nothing more than mental masturbation.

I know I'm coming away sounding like a killjoy, here.  It's not that this stuff isn't fun to think about; I get that part of it.  But yet another article from Loeb talking about how (1) highly-advanced alien civilizations we know nothing about about might (2) use technology that requires an unknown form of exotic matter we also know nothing about to (3) accomplish something physicists aren't even sure is possible, isn't doing anything but giving new meaning to the phrase "Okay, that's a bit far-fetched."

The whole thing put me in mind of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's recent, rather dismal, video "Science is in Trouble, and It Worries Me."  Her contention is that science's contribution to progress in our understanding of the universe, and to improving the wellbeing of humanity, has slowed way down -- that (in her words) "most of what gets published is bullshit."  Not that what gets published is false; that's not what she means.  Just that it's pointless.  The emphasis on science being on the cutting edge, on pushing the limits of what we know, on being "disruptive" (in a good sense), has all but vanished.  Instead, the money-making model -- writing papers so you get citations so you get grants so you can write more papers, and so on and so on -- has blunted the edge of what academia accomplishes, or even can accomplish.

And I can't help but throw this fluff piece by Loeb into that same mix.  As a struggling writer who has yet to exceed a three-figure income from my writing in a given year, I have to wonder how much The Debrief paid Loeb for his article.  I shouldn't be envious of another writer, I guess; and honestly, I wouldn't be if what Loeb had written had scientific merit, or even substance.

But as is, the whole thing pisses me off.  It adds to the public perception of scientists as speculative hand-wavers, gives the credulous the impression that something is possible when it probably isn't, teaches the reader nothing most of us haven't already known for years, and puts another entirely undeserved feather in Avi Loeb's cap.

My general sense is that he was doing less harm when he was looking for an alien hiding behind every tree.

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The Hourglass

Folks who have read a lot of my stories will recognize Flanagan's Irish Pub as a setting for a number of different scenes, and the friendly blonde bartender Valerie who works there has shown up as a recurring minor character in several of my books and short stories.  It's based on a real pub -- the Rongovian Embassy to the United States, in Trumansburg, New York -- now several years defunct, but a fixture for decades in this part of the Finger Lakes.

The idea for "The Hourglass" came to me out of the blue one October day, as I was picturing the interior of the Rongo (as locals called it), and suddenly I had a powerful image of two twenty-somethings, strangers, coming into the bar and both ordering a pint of Guinness.  This starts a conversation... about what? I had to write the story to find out.

The result is a story-within-a-story that is one of the twistiest things I've ever written, and I submit it to you for this week's Fiction Friday, along with a question: what do you think happened at the end?

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The Hourglass

Chad Tarlow consulted his watch.  Seven thirty.  Plenty of time for a pint.  Only one, as usual, both because the beer he liked was expensive, and also because he needed to be lucid when he got back to his apartment.  He still had about five hours of reading and writing to do for his graduate classes, and he’d seen the results of writing papers in an alcohol-induced fog.  He only had two semesters left and he’d have his master’s degree and his teaching license.  No sense screwing it up now.

He sat at the bar, and gave a smile to Valerie, the cute bartender.  Valerie, he knew, was taken, in a long-term relationship with a guy who worked for the college as some kind of environmental researcher.  No use to hit on her.  He did a slow look around the bar, to see if there were any other prospects, but Flanagan’s was pretty dead. Oh, well, it was not like he had time for a girlfriend anyhow.  He sighed, and turned back to find a foamy pint of Guinness waiting for him.

“Saw you come in,” Valerie said, grinning and wiping her hands on a towel.

“I’m getting predictable.” 

“Nothing wrong with knowing what you like.”  She headed off to the other end of the bar to pour a drink for an elderly man who looked like he’d already had one too many.

The door opened, letting in a rush of cool autumn air, and a few dead leaves.  Chad looked up from his pint and saw, with a pang of disappointment, that the newcomer was a young man.  He was perhaps twenty-five, with tousled curly hair, dark eyes, and an angular jaw that was in need of a shave.  He stopped for a moment, and glanced around the place as if looking for someone.

No single women here tonight, bud.  Hope you weren’t counting on getting any.

The man seemed to consider leaving, then with a little shrug came up to the bar, shucked his windbreaker and woolen scarf, and hung them over the back of the barstool two down from where Chad sat.  Valerie came over wearing her usual friendly smile.  “What can I get you?” 

“You have Guinness on tap?”

“Yup.”

“A pint, then.”  He slid a ten-dollar bill toward her and sat down, leaning forward, elbows on the bar.

She drew the pint, and while it was settling she gave him his change.  “You from around here?  Haven’t seen you in here before.”

“I live in Skaneateles.  My first time in here.”

She slid the pint toward him. “Nice town, Skaneateles.” 

“That it is.”

Valerie went to attend to the elderly gentleman, who was waving at her in a rather woozy fashion, leaving Chad and the newcomer with their pints and the awkward silence that always descends between people who are strangers but who are forced to be near each other by circumstance.

“What do you do in Skaneateles?”  Chad finally said, feeling that he couldn’t just sit there without saying anything, drink his beer, and then leave.  But once said, it sounded ridiculous – an empty sentence, like “Have a nice day.”

But the newcomer smiled faintly, and said, “I’m a writer.”

“Really?  What do you write?”

“Novels.  Science fiction, mainly, and some fantasy.  Mostly speculative stuff.”

“That’s cool.”  Chad swiveled a little towards him.  “I’ve always wondered how writers think of their plots.  Especially you science fiction guys.  I mean, you not only have to make up your plot and characters and all, you have to invent a whole world.”

The man smiled again, and took a sip of his pint. “I get asked that a lot.  By the way, my name’s Aaron.”  He extended his hand, which Chad shook.

“Chad.  I’m a grad student in education.  Heading toward teaching physics in high school – provided, of course, that I can get a job.”

Aaron nodded.  “Not easy, these days.”

“But you work from home.  Pretty cool.  You just write stories, and your customers come to you.”

He looked down.  “Something like that.”  He glanced over at the window for a moment, again seeming like he was looking for something or someone.  Then he turned back toward Chad.  “It’s usually the plots that get me stuck.  It can take a long time to work out plot points, because in science fiction, everything’s got to hang together.  The readers immediately pick up on it if there’s an inconsistency.”

“How do you work it out when you get stuck?”

Aaron shrugged.  “I don’t know.  Usually the solution just comes to me sooner or later.  I’m not sure from where.  But when I get badly stuck, sometimes it takes weeks to figure my way through it.”  He paused.  “In fact, I’m trying to work something out right now.  It’s why I went for a drive today – to try to clear my brain and see if I could figure out how the story should go.”

“What are you stuck on?” 

“You want me to tell you?” Aaron's dark eyebrows lifted a little.  “I don’t want to bore you.”

“It won’t bore me.  Look, dude, I have several hours of reading educational philosophy when I get home.  Anything you could come up with would be fascinating by comparison.”

Aaron laughed.  “All right.  It’s a time travel story.”

“Okay.”

“But the time travel isn’t really the point.  I mean, it’s not like The Time Machine, where it went into the fictional technology and all.  Even though it depends on being able to reverse the hourglass, this story focuses more on an ethical dilemma.  And I want to make sure that the story works out the right way.  You know, not corny or trite.  And I’m not sure what to do.”

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michael Himbeault, Hourglass , CC BY 2.0]

“So, when does the character travel to?”

Aaron took another pull on his pint.  “Here’s the deal.  The main character is a nice guy, but he had a really shitty childhood.  His mother was a complete whackjob.  Borderline personality, controlling, manipulative.”  He gestured with one hand.  “The kind of woman who should never be allowed to have children.  But like a lot of borderlines, she appeared normal enough on first glance.  In fact, she was kind of a magnetic personality.  Most people figured out soon enough that she was psycho.  She lost job after job, and so on.  And made her son’s life miserable.”

“Poor kid,” Chad said.

“Right?  The main character’s father was a decent guy, kept trying to help his wife, even though she was kind of beyond help, and stayed in the marriage to shield his son as much as he could.  But the mom was nuts enough that it didn’t really help.  And when the main character was seventeen, his mom had a total flip-out and killed his dad.  She ended up in jail.”

“Wow.  Seriously heavy stuff.”

“Yup.  So, anyway, that’s the setup.  That’s all in the past, in the story.  The reader just finds out about it in the first few chapters.  The son grows up, and he’s got a shitload of baggage from what he went through as a kid.  I mean, graduating from high school – mom’s in jail for killing dad.  The kind of thing most kids never have to deal with.”

“I hope not.  I don’t know what I’d do if something like that happened to one of my students.”

“I guess it happens sometimes.  Teachers got to deal with all sorts of stuff they wish they’d never had to see.  In fact, in the story, it’s the main character’s teachers, and some of his dad’s relatives, that save him.  So, anyway, he grows up, mostly normal, but has all of this psychotic stuff in his past.  Then, time travel is invented.  Scientists find a way to send people backwards, forwards, whatever you want.  And the guy gets an idea; what if he goes back in time, and stops his mom from meeting his father?”

“Seriously?  Like Back to the Future, only in reverse?”

Aaron smiled.  “Sort of like that.  He knows that if he does that, he’ll save his father from twenty years in a horrible relationship, that will end with his being shot to death by the woman he’d married.  But of course, you see the dilemma.”

“If he succeeds, he’ll cease to exist.”

Aaron nodded.  “And I have to be able to answer the question, confidently enough that what my character does makes sense.  You know?  If I’m not sure, I won’t be able to write it convincingly.  So, I guess the question is: do you save someone decades of unhappiness and an early death, at the cost of your own life?  Or do you save your own life even if it means someone you care about will be miserable?”

“The father might have been just as miserable had he not met the mom,” Chad said.  “You never know.”

“That’s true.  But even so.  What should he do?”  Aaron held up one hand, palm upwards.  “It’s just a story, after all.  I can make it come out whatever way I want.”

“Is the main character happy with his life?  I mean, if he’s screwed up himself, maybe he’d be better off, you know… not existing.  Kind of a clean suicide.”

“I didn’t want to make it that clear-cut.  That seemed too corny.  Like, he’s just wanting out, so he goes back in time to kill himself painlessly and save dad the trauma as an added benefit.  In the story, he’s kind of ordinary.  Some days good, some days bad.  He’s got some memories and shit to deal with, yeah – but he’s not, like, despondent or anything.”

“Wow,” Chad said.  “That’s a really interesting question.  I can see why you’re stuck.”

Aaron smiled, and took another drink.  “A puzzler, isn’t it?”

“Well, here’s an idea.  Maybe he should go back in time, you know… and present the idea to the dad.  Tell him what is going to happen.  Let the dad decide.”

“That’s kind of a cop-out.”

“Yeah, but, you know, see if the dad thinks all the misery would be worth it, to have a kid.”

“How could the dad judge that?  You know, condemn himself to twenty years of misery, and knowing he’d be killed at the end of it by the woman he’d married?  Do you really think anyone would be willing to do that voluntarily?”

“I don’t know,” Chad said.  “Maybe it’s a good thing we don’t know our futures.”

“Believe me,” Aaron responded, with some vigor, “since I started working on this story, I’ve thought about that many times.”

Chad finished his pint.  “Well, I’ve got to get going.”

“Educational philosophy waits for no man.”  Aaron gave him a smile.

“Nope.  And, with luck, once I’m actually teaching I’ll never have to read this crap again.”

This got a laugh. “That’s why I stick to writing science fiction.  People actually want to read it.”

Chad stood up, and shook Aaron’s hand.  “Good luck with your story.  I think it’s an interesting idea.  I’m sure you’ll work it out.”

“I hope so,” Aaron said.

Chad picked up his backpack from next to the barstool, and said goodbye to Valerie.  As he was approaching the door, it opened, admitting another gust of cool air.  A woman walked in – slim, with shoulder-length brown hair and sparkling blue eyes.  She glanced his way, and smiled.

No boyfriend in tow.  Okay, did he really need to stop at one pint?  He had time for another, right?

Chad opened his mouth to say something to her – his usual pickup line was, “Can I buy you a drink, or would you prefer to break my heart?”, which worked about fifty percent of the time, and in the other half of the cases just resulted in an eyeroll.  But something in him seemed to stall.  The words would not form, and the smile died on his lips.

The woman walked past him, and up to the bar. Chad turned to watch her.  And up on a shelf, behind the bar, was something he had never noticed before – a large hourglass in an ornate wooden frame, filled with white sand.  Valerie turned away from the elderly gentleman, who was finally paying his tab and seemed to be trying to determine if he could successfully stand up.  The woman sat down on one of the barstools at the otherwise empty bar, crossed her legs at the ankles, and rested her elbows on the polished mahogany top, smiling at Valerie and saying something too quietly for Chad to hear.  Valerie smiled, and turned – and then picked up the hourglass and flipped it over.

Chad watched the stream of sand spilling downwards for a moment, a distant expression on his face, like someone just waked from dreaming.  Then he walked out, alone, into the windy October night.

***********************************

Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Bad news from the future

My current work-in-progress (well, work-in-extremely-slow-progress) is a fall-of-civilization novel called In the Midst of Lions that I swear wasn't inspired by the events of the last year and a half.  Set in 2035, it chronicles the struggles of five completely ordinary people to survive in a hellscape that has been created by an all-too-successful rebellion and war, that one character correctly calls "burning down the house you're locked in" because the resulting chaos is as deadly to the rebels as to the people they're rebelling against.

I suppose it's natural enough to assume the future is gonna be pretty bad.  I mean, look around.  The United States is gearing up for another catastrophic heat wave, we're in the middle of a pandemic, and so much of the western U.S. is on fire that the smoke is making it difficult to breathe here in upstate New York.

I try to stay optimistic, but being an inveterate worrier, it's hard at times.

Albert Goodwin, Apocalypse (1903) [Image is in the Public Domain]

If the current news isn't bad enough, just yesterday I ran into not one but two people who claim to be time travelers from the future who have come back somehow to let us know that we're in for a bad time.

The first, who calls himself Javier, goes by the moniker @UnicoSobreviviente ("only survivor") and posts videos allegedly from the year 2027 on TikTok.  "I just woke up in a hospital and I don’t know what happened," he says.  "Today is February 13, 2027 and I am alone in the city."

How he's posting on TikTok in 2021 if he's stuck in 2027, he never explains.

However, I must admit the videos are a little on the creepy side.  They do appear to show a city devoid of human life.  On the other hand, everything looks like it's in pretty good shape.  One theme I've had to deal with in my own novel is how fast stuff would fall apart/stop working if we were to stop maintaining it -- the answer, in most cases, seems to be "pretty damn fast."  (If you are looking for a somewhat depressing but brilliantly interesting read, check out the book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which considers this question in detail.)

So either Javier showed up immediately after the rest of humanity vanished, or else his videos are just an example of a cleverly-edited hoax.

I know which I think is more likely.

The other alleged time traveler goes by the rather uncreative name @FutureTimeTraveler, and also posts on TikTok (apparently this is the preferred mode by which time travelers communicate with the present).  And he says our comeuppance is gonna be a lot sooner than 2027.  He says it will come at the hands of seven-foot-four-inch aliens with "long, distorted skulls" who will land on Earth on May 24, 2022.  They're called Nirons, he says, and come in peace, but humans (whose habit of fucking up alien encounters has been the subject of countless movies and television shows) decide it's an invasion and fire on them.  This initiates a war.

So we've got an alien race who can cross interstellar space fighting a species who thinks it's impressive when a billionaire launches himself for a few minutes aboard what appears to be a giant metal dick.

Guess who wins.

Interestingly, this is not the first case of an alleged time traveler talking about future attacks by Nirons.  Another TikTok user, @ThatOneTimeTraveler, says the Nirons come from Saturn and we're going to get our asses handed to us.

So, corroboration, amirite?  Must be true!

I figure I'm doing my civic duty by letting everyone know that they should get themselves ready for a rough ride.  We've got the Nirons coming next year, then everyone vanishes five years after that, and if that's not bad enough, in 2035 there's a massive rebellion that takes down civilization entirely.  (Yes, I know that (1) it's impossible to have a rebellion if everyone disappeared eight years earlier, and (2) the rebellion itself is part of a novel I made up myself.  Stop asking questions.)

Anyhow, I figure knowing all this will take our minds off the fact that we seem to be doing our level best to destroy ourselves right here in the present.  I'm hoping I at least live long enough to meet the Nirons.  Sounds like they'll probably blast me with their laser guns immediately afterward, but you know how I am about aliens.  If I'm gonna die anyway, that's a fitting end.

**************************************

One of the characteristics which is -- as far as we know -- unique to the human species is invention.

Given a problem, we will invent a tool to solve it.  We're not just tool users; lots of animal species, from crows to monkeys, do that.  We're tool innovators.  Not that all of these tools have been unequivocal successes -- the internal combustion engine comes to mind -- but our capacity for invention is still astonishing.

In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, author Ainissa Ramirez takes eight human inventions (clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips) and looks not only at how they were invented, but how those inventions changed the world.  (To take one example -- consider how clocks and artificial light changed our sleep and work schedules.)

Ramirez's book is a fascinating lens into how our capacity for innovation has reflected back and altered us in fundamental ways.  We are born inventors, and that ability has changed the world -- and, in the end, changed ourselves along with it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Greta of the Yukon

If you needed more evidence of how little it takes to get the woo-woos leaping about making excited squeaking noises, look no further than this photograph, which they're saying proves that Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg is a time traveler.

Okay, I'll admit there's a resemblance.  For reference, here's a photograph of the real Greta Thunberg:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons European Parliament, Greta Thunberg urges MEPs to show climate leadership (49618310531) (cropped), CC BY 2.0]

The first image is real enough; it's not a clever fake.  It's a photograph of children working at a Canadian placer gold mine, and was taken in 1898.  The original photograph resides in the archives of the University of Washington, and carries the description, "three children operating rocker at a gold mine on Dominion Creek, Yukon Territory."

This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.  Previous iterations include an 1870 photograph proving that Nicolas Cage is an undead vampire, and a self-portrait by nineteenth-century French painter Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel showing that he's the same person as Keanu Reeves.  What's simultaneously hilarious and maddening about this last claim is that okay, the painting looks a little like Reeves, but later photographs of Boutet de Monvel (which you can see at the link provided) look nothing like him at all.  Which you'd think would make the woo-woos laugh sheepishly and say, "Okay, I guess we were wrong.  What a bunch of goobers we are."  But that never happens.  I'll bet some of them think Reeves realized people were catching on to his undead-ness and arranged for pics to be taken of some other guy that then were labeled with Boutet de Monvel's name.

Because there's no claim so ridiculous that you can't change it so as to make it even more ridiculous.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating how loony these claims get, back to the non-Thunberg photo, which has generated two explanations, if I can dignify them by that term:

1. Thunberg was a child in late nineteenth-century northern Canada, was forced to work in a gold mine, and was so appalled by the environmental destruction caused by mining that she either time-traveled into the future or else figured out how to achieve immortality and eternal youth (sources differ on which), and is now bringing that first-hand knowledge to us so we can potentially do something about it.
2. Thunberg actually is a twenty-first-century Swedish person, but has figured out how to travel in time so she can go back and sabotage mining operations and save the present from the devastation done by industry in the past.  She got caught at her game by a photographer back in 1898.

What strikes me about both of these, besides the fact that to believe either one you'd have to have a pound and a half of lukewarm cream-of-wheat where most of us have a brain, is that if either of these is Thunberg's strategy, it's not working.  If she's a poor mining kid from 1898 and has come into the future to warn us, mostly what's happening is that government leaders and corporate CEOs are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "la la la la la la la not listening," while they proceed to continue doing every damnfool destructive thing they've always done, only harder.  If, on the other hand, today's Thunberg is going back into the past to throw a spanner into the works of the mining corporations, it had zero effect, because if you'll look carefully at the history of mining for the last 120 years, you will not find lines like, "Between 1900 and 1950, thirty-seven different mining operations all over North America were shut down permanently, because a mysterious teenage girl with a long braid snuck in and dynamited the entrance to the mining shafts, then disappeared without trace."  

So okay, the girl looks a little like Thunberg.  I'll grant you that.  But the claim that she is Thunberg makes me want to weep softly while banging my forehead on my desk.  It seems like the woo-woos have espoused some kind of anti-Ockham's-Razor; given a variety of explanations for the same phenomenon, let's pick the one that is the most ridiculous and requires a metric fuckton of ad hoc assumptions.  

I'll just end by stating that if I'm wrong, and Thunberg is an immortal time-traveler, I wish she'd stop wasting her time in the hopeless task of trying to convince the money-grubbing anti-science world leaders we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and go back in time with blueprints for high-efficiency solar cell technology.  Give 'em to Nikola Tesla.  I bet he'd know what to do with them.

********************************

I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Timey-wimey travel

A lot of us here in the United States would love to have a crystal ball and find out what's going to happen in the next few months.  After all, using logic to predict the direction our government is going is a seriously losing proposition.  As a student of mine put it, "I keep thinking things can't get any weirder.  Then they do."

So allow me to put all your worries to rest.  We now know what's going to happen.

Because a time traveler from the year 2030 has come back to tell us all about it.

His name is "Noah."  Why exactly he decided to come back here is a matter of conjecture, since he claims that we can't change anything he's predicting, as it's in his past.  But there are two things that he says will happen that are a little eyebrow-raising.

First, he says that Donald Trump will win re-election in 2020.  This is a little hard to fathom because I would have thought it'd be a little difficult to run the country from a prison cell.

Second, he says that in 2028, Yolanda Renee King, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., will be sworn in as president.  This is kind of weird for a completely different reason, which is that she will be only twenty years old at the time.  Currently, you have to be 35 years old to run for president, so this would be a serious change in policy.

On the other hand, the cadre of Old White Men has fucked things up pretty badly, maybe it's time to let the Young People of Color have a chance.

Anyhow, Noah says an amendment to the Constitution will take care of the age issue.  Hard to imagine that getting any kind of traction in Congress, but five years ago, I'd have said the same thing about the likelihood of Congress looking the other way while a sociopathic serial adulterer used the presidency to line his own pockets.  While Billy Graham's son, of all people, called said sociopathic serial adulterer a "Man of God."

So things have to be pretty weird for me to say "no, that couldn't happen" any more.

As for Noah, he says he's not trying to change anyone's mind about anything.  "This is not an opinion, this is a fact from the future that actually happens," Noah said.  "I’m not here to persuade anyone to political opinions."  And apparently, time travel itself isn't all that much fun.  "I have many body implications and things all over myself," he said, "and I step in this giant dome and these things fire up and basically a large electronic weight basically pushes you through time.  It feels like if you got electrocuted."

Which brings up a series of questions, the most important of which is: what the fuck is a "body implication?"  I'm guessing he meant "implant," but who knows?  Eloquence doesn't seem to be emphasized in the schools of the future, if Noah is any indication.

In any case, time travel sounds pretty uncomfortable to me, making me wonder why he did it in the first place.  I mean, if he can't get us to change our ways and avoid the future he's predicting (because we can't change anything that's going to happen), what's his motivation?  From what he's saying, it sounds like pretty much everything is a Dr. Who-style fixed point in time.

So unless time is actually a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, I'm not really seeing the point.

Noah says he has proof, though, and he brings out an x-ray of his hand with a blurry blob on it that he says is an implanted device that is critical for time travel.  Because clearly that wouldn't be easy to fake, or anything.

Anyhow, that's today's dip in the deep end, thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who alerted me to the claim.  Predictably, I'm unimpressed.  This is hopeful in that it means there's a good likelihood that Trump won't be re-elected.  As far as the rest -- the Constitutional amendment and Yolanda King being elected in 2028 -- I guess we'll have to wait to find out.

Like I said, weirder things have happened.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Nazi coins from the future

In the latest from the "News Stories That Make Me Want To Take Ockham's Razor And Slit My Wrists With It" department, we have a claim about an odd coin allegedly found near a construction site in Mexico.

First, the facts of the situation, insofar as I could find out.

The coin is highly weathered, and has some phrases in both German and Spanish.  It says "Nueva Alemania" ("New Germany," in Spanish) and "Alle in einer Nation" (German for "all in one nation").  There's a swastika on one side and the Iron Cross on the other, and a blurred date ending in "39."  (If you want to see a video that includes shots of the coin, there's a clip at The Daily Star showing it and its finder, Diego Aviles.)

So that's the claim.  Now let's see which of the three possible explanations proffered to account for it makes the most sense to you:

1. It's a fake.
2. It's an obscure coin, dating from the late 1930s, and could be potentially valuable as a historical artifact.
3. The date actually reads "2039," so it's a coin from 21 years in the future, at which point a Nazi state will rule Mexico if not the rest of the world, except that one of the future Nazis time-slipped backwards and dropped the coin, only to be found by Aviles.  Since the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Nazis have been hiding out in Antarctica, from which they will burst out some time between now and 2039, to initiate World War III and take over the entire world.

Yes, apparently there are people who think that explanation #3 is spot-on.  So it's like someone reworded Ockham's Razor to read, "Of competing explanations that account for all of the known facts, the most likely one is the one that requires 5,293 ad-hoc assumptions, breaking every known law of physics, and pretzel logic that only someone with the IQ of a peach pit could think sounded plausible."

But maybe I'm being a little uncharitable, because there are people who add to #3 some bizarre bullshit about it having to do with the "Mandela effect" and parallel universes and alternate realities.

Myself, I'm perfectly satisfied when I can explain things using the regular old reality.  But that's just me.

NOTE: Not the coin they found.  This one's a real Nazi coin.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Over at Mysterious Universe (the first link provided above), Sequoyah Kennedy does a pretty thorough job of debunking the whole thing, ending with the following tongue-in-cheek comment that rivals this post for snark:

Maybe the only explanation is that the Antarctic Nazis develop time travel in the near future, go back in time to the 1930’s, and try to convince the Mexican government to side with them in WWII by giving them a commemorative coin, which won’t work, because that’s a ridiculous and insulting way to forge an alliance.  The commemorative future coin will then be thrown away and left to sit in the dirt until it’s unearthed in 2018.  It’s the only rational explanation, really.

Indeed.  And we should also take into account that the story was broken in The Daily Star, which is the only media source I know that rivals The Daily Mail Fail for sheer volume of nonsense.

So the coin may well exist, but I'm putting my money on "fakery."  Even the idea that it's a real coin from the 1930s doesn't bear much scrutiny, because Mexico and Germany weren't on the same side in World War II, so it'd be pretty bizarre to have some kind of Mexican Nazi currency lying around.

Of course, when the Stormtroopers come roaring out of their secret bases in Antarctica and Cancun, I suppose I'll have to eat my words.  Occupational hazard of what I do.

*********************

This week's Featured Book on Skeptophilia:

This week I'm featuring a classic: Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  Sagan, famous for his work on the series Cosmos, here addresses the topics of pseudoscience, skepticism, credulity, and why it matters -- even to laypeople.  Lucid, sometimes funny, always fascinating.